I was struck by a comment that S of Australia made in a recent post: “I can’t tell you how many times [the blog] has scraped me up from the dungeons of despair when I’ve felt so helpless and afraid for all of us.” (1)
Dungeons of despair. I do know that one. I no longer go there, thank Gawd.
If I were self-serving, I’d say the escape happened because of all the growth work I’ve done (Cold Mountain Institute, est, Zen and Vipassana mediation, Enlightenment Intensives).
You remember that a person operating self-servingly gives him/herself credit for all victories, successes, wins and gains and attributes to others the responsibility for all defeats, failures, losses and deficits.
In fact throughout all those years of work, my vasanas did not disappear. It was only the rising energies, coming directly from the Heart of One to Earth, and from other civilizations and dimensions, that lifted me, and probably you, to a place where vasanas could actually be dislodged and eradicated.
Nonetheless many things have become clear about the eradication of unwanted feelings like despair and the chief one is that the answer lies within.
You’ve heard the joke about the Tibetan monk who goes into a pizza parlour in New York and says to the counterman: “Make me one with everything.”
The pizzaman makes him one with everything and charges him ten dollars. The yogi hands him a twenty-dollar bill and the pizza man puts it in his till and turns back to the yogi, who asks him for his change.
The pizza man tells him, “My son, change comes from within.”
Indeed. You can try numerous ways of dislodging despair and they won’t work. It stubbornly resists all attempts to change it. In fact, as Werner Erhard said, resistance – and change is a form of resistance – causes persistence.
However, there are also ways to work with ourselves the way I think we were meant to work and they cause the unwanted condition to lift.
When I left my marriage back in 2007, I lay on my bed for six months, just being with the loneliness. I refused to go out onto gay Davie Street and mingle with people at the coffee shops. I wanted loneliness gone once and for all.
One day, six months into that process, loneliness lifted and did not return until I was apart from Kathleen last Spring and it made a sudden reappearance.
Now that is the long way to cause an unwanted feeling to lift. It works but it takes time.
More recently I discovered a simple exercise that caused really hard-to-accept feelings like loneliness to lift – and I think it would work with despair as well.
Just breathe in and imagine that on the inbreathe you’re lifting a bucket full of love from the well of your heart. Then on the out breath imagine that you’re sending that love out to the world.
The love going through you will cause the unwanted feeling to vanish in less than a heartbeat.
Love is the universal solvent, just as it is the universal building block and the universal glue. Whatever miracles are worked in this world are worked with and through love.
We get the experience of love as it passes through us. And that love dissolves our worst feelings. Try it.
Kathleen showed me a process a little while back that works with the Universal Law of Attraction and Repulsion, Erica is transcribing the tape we made (Kathleen lives three floors below me and we often Skype).
That process has also proven successful and I’ll post it here soon.
The well of love we have within us is what cures us of diseases and complaints. Add to that the love – for that is what the energies are that are being beamed to us – coming from “without” and you have the source of our salvation from unwanted conditions.
Footnotes
(1) “The Difficulty of Taking Action,” Jan. 24, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/01/24/the-difficulty-of-taking-action/